Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Playing the Al Qaeda card on Syria

Following western debates about the ongoing Syrian catastrophe, I find it interesting that many of the same people who usually
go out of their way to make excuses for jihadist violence by murderous
theocratic fanatics (whose actions, after all, are just understandable
"blowback" provoked by western violence against Muslims) reject any
measures to assist Syrian opponents of the Assad regime on the grounds
that the rebels are ... murderous theocratic jihadist fanatics.

(Hypocrisy aside, it's certainly true that some of the rebels in Syria are
murderous theocratic jihadist fanatics. On the other hand, one of the perverse
consequences of western "non-intervention" in the Syrian civil war, promoted by these kinds of arguments, is a
situation in which one side, the Assad regime, is being
heavily armed, supplied, reinforced, and otherwise supported by Russia
and Iran and Lebanon's Hizbullah, while the most poisonous
Sunni-jihadist tendencies on the rebel side have their own outside
sources of arms and funding and reinforcements ... and the less extremist
tendencies within the opposition are starved for arms and supplies. The
result is to strengthen the role of the most murderous, intolerant, and fanatical Sunni jihadists on the rebel side.)

About Me

Jeff Weintraub is a social & political theorist, political sociologist, and democratic socialist who has been teaching most recently at the University of Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr College, and the New School for Social Research, He was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University in 2015-2016 and a Research Associate at the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, Bryn Mawr College.
(Also an Affiliated Professor with the University of Haifa in Israel & an opponent of academic blacklists.)